Odds and Ends

A little while back (on October 2), I wrote about a postcard I have from a soldier at Camp Sherman.  I wasn't sure then if the card was sent before the deadly influenza outbreak influenza outbreak at the camp - I have confirmed that the outbreak began in September.  I have not yet tried to find more about the card's sender, I only have a partial name due to the wear on the edges of the card.  This is something I plan on investigating soon, so stay tuned for more details!

The past few days have been a bust as far as sewing or other creativity.  I am looking into making zipper flowers, as recently acquired a small stash of vintage metal zippers.  The zippers and a whole bunch of other sewing notions came out of this nifty little antiques show find, thanks to my mom:

This is the third diptych style sewing caddy that we have.  They are turning out great to have for keeping threads and embellishments together by project.  They still take up a bit of room when folded, measuring about 18 X 30 X 5."  I am envisioning creating a space for them somewhere to line them up like books on a shelf.  These sub-collections within collections are getting out of hand...

World War I Poppies - Finished!

Here it is, my own mixed collage interpretation of the World War I poppies:

Image and design copyright RPS

Here is a detail of the letter:

Image and design copyright RPS

The letter is actually a note on a postcard (copied onto fabric) that came with one of those wonderful scrapbooks that I found earlier this year.  There is no doubt that they came from a local family.  The postcard is a double length one:

The sender was apparently training at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio.  The card is postmarked August 22, 1918 to a resident of Quaker City, Ohio.  Judging from the message, it was before the devastating influenza outbreak that occurred that year.  I wonder if the sender made it through the epidemic, and if he ever made it overseas.  The message reads:
        "Hello Rodney - How is the pike job coming?  We had some try out on Liberty trucks like they            take through there last Friday.  We will be driving trucks in France within a month from today if          we get over all OK.  We have a dandy pair of driving gloves & we get a Norfolk overcoat at the          port of embarkation wherever that will be we don't know.  But we can get a few shots of good              French wine, ha ha.

Latest Adventures, Having Fun

Can anyone blame me for not wanting to sit in front of my computer when I've had a week like this?  First, this is the week of the annual Route 40 Yard Sales.  I took a day off from work on Wednesday, rain dampened the four days of the event, but I found a couple of astounding late 1800s scrapbooks.  Here is a sample of the treasures in them:

I am a casual collector of paper ephemera, I never thought that I would find anything like these.  They have a bit of everything, calling cards (social media, 1800s style), advertising cards, newspaper clippings, and embossed and printed cut outs that were sold just for scrapbooks.  The newspaper clippings are mostly social news columns for rural communities near where I live.  Notice the date in the above image, but I don't know who MSL was, I have not found a full name with those initials yet.  One of the scrapbooks goes to World War I, with clippings about local residents in the war effort. 

In between everything else, it is tomato planting time again:

Finally, I tried something new this year and went to a produce auction to get a stash of locally grown. strawberries to freeze for the year ahead:

I have usually been able get strawberries from local Amish farmers selling from the roadside, but I have not been in the right place at the right time this year.  They must all be taking their produce to the auction, so I will be buying there from now on.  I simply cannot eat grocery store strawberries anymore, they are picked when underripe to survive shipping, and strawberries do not continue to ripen once they are picked - sour and tart tasting.  The local berries are right on ripe, so sweet and delicious.  I am looking forward to strawberry cake, strawberry milkshakes, strawberry shortcake, strawberry bread...

Giant Pumpkins!

I have slipped farther behind, trying to finish two quilts for the upcoming Mutton Hill Quilt Show.  One of the entries is the purple collage that I blogged about earlier in the year.  With three days left before I have to deliver it to the show, I am still not sure that it is going to turn out OK.  More thoughts on that later in the week...

With all that I am trying to accomplish, I lost a day last week because I HAD to go to the Barnesville, OH Pumpkin Festival to see this:

A 2,150 pound pumpkin!  It is a state record, and so far the biggest pumpkin on record in the world for 2017.  I do not regret going to the Festival, not at all!  I recommend exploring odd festivals in your region, there is always something to learn.  I have been working on ways to incorporate small town pride into my artwork.  A few solid ideas have emerged, I just need to get working on making them.

See, hear and taste

A week of my life gone, vanished in the process of doing my taxes!  Here's a quick report on my trip a few weeks ago to the annual Original Sewing & Quilting Expo in Cleveland.  This is the one held at the I-X Center, the former WWII bomber factory (later produced tanks during the Korean War).  Lots of history in those walls.

I saw the SAQA "Two by Twenty" exhibit - delightfully inspiring, as expected.  I noticed a few quilts whose edges were not bound in the traditional manner, looked to be just stitched very close to the edges to hold the three layers.  I will be exploring this "non-binding" in the next few months.

As I was anticipating having to pay a bunch on my taxes, I could not purchase much, but I found a few mixed bags from a couple different vendors:

Kimono silk scraps, and a bunch of fancy ribbons and trims.  I cannot resist embellishments!  I see more crazy quilt-type collages in  my future.  Stunningly, where I bought the most was not from a sewing vendor.  I purchased a small fortune of blended teas from SubRosa Tea.  I'm not much of a tea drinker, but their blends are quite creative and delicious.  I am enjoying Pina Colada, Spiced Mexican Chocolate, Cafe Latte, Strawberry Ginger, Chocolate Mint, and Coconut Truffle.  I appreciate creative and quality food as much as I love beautiful dyed fabric and art quilts.  To finish off this ramble on appealing to the senses, I have been listening this week to Verdi - Il Trovatore, Smetana - Ma Vlast, and Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture and Symphonies #3 and #4.

Scrapbooks and Ephemera, Conclusion

Hopefully, I have enlightened my readers about two fascinating collectors, Theodore Langstroth and Joseph Cornell.  I have good reasons for spending so much time on them in this textile art blog.  First, the odd subject-specific scrapbooks and dossiers are perfect illustrations of how one can find creative inspiration just about anywhere.  If you are looking for ideas, consider things that you love and look at what you have chosen to surround yourself with at home.  Make a list of people, living or not, whom you would find interesting to meet.  What countries fascinate you, what regions of your own country interest you?  What is your town known for?  What has been forgotten about it that people might want to know?  What mundane objects in your life deserve more attention?

Memories of past road trips, before interstates.  There is an art quilt idea here...

I know that not everyone is a collector of stuff.  Many of us want to get rid of stuff.  This leads to another reason why I profiled Langstroth and Cornell.  I'm beginning to believe that a good bit of what we throw in the trash, someone might be in need or want of elsewhere.  I am constantly amazed at the prices some people pay for things at the junk auction that I would have tossed out.  Yes, a lot of trash is just trash, but I wonder how much money gets thrown away each week in the way of objects that others would pay to have.  Not only am I thinking of the cultural heritage that is being thrown out, but potential aesthetic creation.  As I have described before, I use re-purposed vintage textiles in my dyeing and fabric collages.  I'm working on some craft workshop ideas where I work that will re-purpose select trash items, so this whole theme is on my mind quite a bit.  I could go on and on with this, but I should work on securing some compact discs that no longer play.

More Auction Treasures

If you are looking for creative inspiration, there is so much in your own community.  This past weekend for me was chock full of local history.  I attended an estate sale and an estate auction and came away with more knowledge of the area I now call home and some great future art project ideas. 

                                      

The first sale yielded a small collection of gravestone rubbing how-to books and supplies, among other items.  Old cemeteries are a great source for local history and genealogy, and potential places to observe folk art stone carving.  I have already been well acquainted with incorporating gravestone carving into my own art, first in ceramics, and now making crayon rubbings on fabric.  This is a printed vintage tablecloth, pulled out of the weekly junk auction, covered in a collage of gravestone rubbings:

Image copyright RPS, please do not pin or re-post

The auction was the estate of a couple who had printed the town newspaper for decades.  There were a few rare local history books; I was soundly outbid on one lot of the books, but I bought the second lot, and I am dutifully studying them.  Half of the auction was the contents of the house, the other half was the bulk of the printing items.  The newspaper was apparently printed in a shed at the back of the property.  A calendar from 1974 in the shed had a note on December 26 that read, “Last day of Home Towner.”  After the printing of that last newspaper, the owner must have locked the shed and left it.  I bought a boxful of copies of two local history booklets that had been printed there and were authored by the couple.  There were lots and lots of old metal printing blocks for advertising, all of them went out of my price range.  I would have liked to get a few for display and to have something from this piece of area history.  I didn’t want to bid too much on them, as the metal plates were too shallow to use for rubbings, and I don’t want to get into messy printing inks.  I’m more interested in things that I can use rather than just look at these days.

There were several boxes of 9 X 12” sheets of embossed advertising graphics.  They were embossed in a positive orientation, which made them good for rubbings, if the fine detail could be captured.

Image copyright RPS, please do not pin or re-post

 I decided to take a chance on them.  Luckily, no one else wanted them, I and have two large boxes full of the sheets and a boxful of the monthly catalogs for the ad sheets from the manufacturer.  The ad sheets I now have are from the mid to late 1960s.

I have not been able to find much about these ad sheets.  All I have found so far is from an Ebay listing  from seller BenningtonBargains: “In the days of hot type, advertisers would send these mats to newspapers who would pour lead into them and then use the lead plate on presses to print the ads in newspapers.  These were generally discarded after the lead pouring.  So this mat is extremely rare.”  It looks like they are made of fine grained paper (heavier than cardstock) with some sort of coating.

I am happy to report that they make great rubbings on fabric:

Image copyright RPS, please do not pin or re-post

They work decently with paper, although the sections with finer detail do not turn out as well.  These open up so many creative possibilities in my collage explorations.  I will have some of the ad sheets for sale at upcoming quilt shows, and I will list a few on my Etsy store in the next week. 

Another Shop to Buy my Fabric!

I am pleased to announce that my hand dyed fabrics are now available in Southeast Ohio!  The Old Bank Mercantile has a small selection of my dyed vintage damask tablecloths and large napkins, some fat quarters and half yard cuts, creativity kits, embellishing yarns and dyed vintage fancy pieces (crocheted or embroidered items).  

The shop is located at 180 Broadway, Quaker City, Ohio; open Tuesday through Saturday.  Quaker City is not too far from the intersection of interstates 70 and 77, in the general vicinity of Cambridge and Salt Fork State Park.  If your travels take you to the region, please make a little side trip to check it out.  The shop is located in a 100-some year old bank building (could you tell from the name?).  The owners are still working on restoration, and have kept original fixtures when possible.  Their huge batting rolls are kept in the bank’s vault!  Stop by, support a local business, and support historic preservation.

Adventures in the Bluegrass

My annual trip back to Lexington, Kentucky always leaves me completely spent, but as always, a good time was had.  The main purpose for the trip is BreyerFest, the convention for collectors of model horses.  Since I lived in Lexington for five years, there are places that I got to know that I must revisit.   

This year, I planned to spend half a day in the beautiful Lexington Cemetery.  I have been playing with making rubbings of interesting gravestone carvings with crayon on fabric.  On previous visits to the Lexington Cemetery, I discovered several graves that had long, profound poems carved into them.  Way back, I made some rubbings on paper of them that I now cannot find.  I want now to make some art quilts incorporating those poems.  Of course, I never wrote down the sections where those graves were located.

 

Even at 9 AM, it was awfully hot and humid.  I wandered through a couple a sections, and made a few uninspired rubbings.  One was a nice Celtic knot pattern:

I drove to another part of the cemetery, wandered a bit more, still not finding what I wanted.  By accident, I found the resting place of the notorious General John Hunt Morgan.  I have a tenuous connection to the Confederate general – I’m fairly certain that Morgan passed by the property I now live on during his brazen Ohio raid.  At this point, I realized that I would have to come back in cooler weather for the sole purpose of finding the graves I wanted.  I had thought that I would have a nice start to a new art quilt featuring gravestone rubbings, but not yet.   

Then it was on to another favorite Lexington spot, The Stitch Niche.  This is a nice yarn and cross stitch shop, but I do not knit, crochet, or cross stitch.  As I’ve indicated in other posts, I use all sorts of funky yarns as embellishments, and there are a variety of fancy threads marketed for cross stitch that are also great for hand sewn embroidery (think crazy quilts, Carol Ann Waugh’s Stupendous Stitches, etc.).  I have really gotten to love the varied lines put out by Rainbow Gallery, and the Stitch Niche has a small selection.  I think I bought at least one of each of the different lines that they had:

 

It is raining now, much needed.  Since I cannot attend to the garden, I will be trying out my new fancy threads.  I need to start a crazy quilt sample for the upcoming shows.

Art on the Hill Wrap-up

I survived my first outdoor art fair as a vendor!  It was a beautiful summer day, not overly hot, and no rain despite some ominous dark clouds that passed overhead from time to time.  Here is my first attempt at setting up an art fair booth:

Thank goodness I have very supportive parents who not only helped me tote the stuff there and back, but also did much with the layout and set-up of everything.

Mantua, Ohio is a quaint old town, and by old I mean that most of the town is 100+ year old buildings - something I like to see. 

The art fair was a fundraiser for the ongoing revitalization of the town, so I was happy to help support the effort.  I do wish that the fair attendees had been a bit more supportive of the artists.  I had higher hopes, but I made a few sales, and talked to some really neat people throughout the day.  Thank you to those of you who bought my work.  However, it definitely was a community event that did not attract many people from out of the immediate area with money to spend.  I'm still glad I got out, gained some experience with outdoor art fairs, and visited somewhere I had never been before.

I have never seen square slates like this on the side of a building!  (This is at the back of the grain building in the above picture.)  It reminds me of a huge quilt... yet another idea is brewing in my brain!

I have a quilt show this weekend too:

July 16-17 (9-5 Saturday, 11-4 Sunday) Pieceable Quilters Guild, Zanesville, OH; Muskingum County Fairgrounds Veterans Complex, Brighton Blvd & Pershing Rd.  Admission $5

Please come out if you are nearby and buy my fabric!

Rags Paper Ramblings

A quick journey down the road to check out an auction, mostly Amish goods.  Dozens and dozens of farm fresh local eggs, homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, cookies.  Some old junk, some new junk.  Tomato plants, only slightly less sorry looking than my own plants started from seed.  Nothing I wanted to stay for, saving some money.  On the way home, I stopped by an S-bridge, a rather unique construction to this region.

How much longer will it last?  How long will what I create last in this world?  Consciously or unconsciously, we all try to make our mark in the world.

Auction Adventures

Everyone has some vice, a weakness that they find difficult to resist indulging.  I have developed a bit of an auction problem.  Even as broke as I am right now, I cannot resist the temptation to attend an estate auction within a half hour or so drive.  Now, I am NOT a hoarder, not at all.  I don’t go to every possible auction, only the close by ones that have stuff that I actively collect or could use for the textile art.  I don’t buy things just to buy something.  Much of my auction attendance is for business, since I use mostly old table linens, doilies and other vintage textiles.

 

 

 

Last night, I went to an auction in a neighboring county.  I felt apprehensive going to it, as it was apparently the liquidation of a tiny historical society.  Being one who is appreciative of local history, I felt odd about the situation.  The offerings were rather mystifying considering the source (not a complete list, but enough of a word picture):

 

                Thousands of 1970s to modern postcards

                At least 100 sample advertising calendars from printing companies, none local

                Loads of unopened packs of cheap picture prints from the 1920s-1960s

                Railroad, coal and other industrial company papers, certificates, etc.

                Lots and lots of assorted advertising papers items, most with no local connection

                5-6 boxes of unused pop bottle labels from a bottler in another state

                Lots of worn, torn late 1800s/early 1900s clothing 

That was the bulk of the auction, and I could not make any rational connection between the stuff and the location.  There were a few local items, but not what I would have expected.  If that was the collection of the historical society, no wonder they had trouble staying open.

The best of my purchases was this: 

 

It doesn’t look like anything great, yet, but that is the sort of stuff I love to dye.  A couple small fancy tablecloths, some damask napkins.   

Another flat: 

 

Two torn old (before 1940, I guess) vests, two old nightshirts (I think) and a black wool coat, maybe early 1900s?  I don’t know fashion history.  The coat, I don’t know what to do with.  The rest of this flat will be cut up into other things, I have a plan to make cotton paper pulp sculptures someday, and I have a theory that old cotton will be great for that. 

The last box: 

 

Only part of the contents, but you get the idea - a lot of Victorian scrapbook cards, with some assorted advertising paper and a few calling cards from the late 1800s.  Finally, some progress towards fulfilling the “paper” part of my business name.  I already incorporate paper in some of my art quilts, and I want to make some fabric and paper collages on canvas.  Here I go!